Collaboration for Revit: Opening the Doors for Real Collaborative Project Execution

DEEPAK MAINI: All right, let's get started. So officially, thank you guys for coming to this class. We really appreciate that. And again, a big round of applause to you guys because of you, this class got sold out within two weeks. So thank you for that.

All right, let's get started with our introduction. I'll start with my introduction. My name is Deepak Maini. I am the national technical manager with a company called Cadgroup Australia. Based out of Sydney, flew here on Saturday, and I'm still jet-lagged. Would you believe that? [CHUCKLES]

So I'm based in Sydney. That's where our head office is. We've got offices in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth as well. I've been speaking at AU for last six years, or five years. This is my sixth year as a speaker. I have been top-rated speaker for the last four years. Again, thanks to people like you who give good ratings to my session, I get that kind of rating. Hopefully we'll do a good job, and you think that it's a good class, and you give us good rating.

I've also written a few books. This, as I said, is on a software called Navisworks. And this is on a software called Advance Steel, which is a steel design and detailing package. I'm also a guest lecturer and two of the main universities in New South Wales, which is the state where Sydney is, University of Technology Sydney and University of New South Wales, where I teach construction management. Love teaching construction management, especially to the student who have never been to the construction industry. It's amazing, believe me. No, it's not.

[LAUGHTER]

All right, so the funny thing is, at one of the presentations, somebody said, oh, that's a pretty cool profile. And I looked at it and I said, yeah, I've been doing all right for last 18 years. And then I went home, and I met this guy. This guy is my seven-year-old son, and he has a quadruple world champion. I'll repeat this again. He's a quadruple world champion in karate. Actually, the day he turned seven, he won three world championships. And the next day, the following day, he won one more world championship.

So these are his world championship belts. The belts are bigger than this guy himself. This is his trophy cabinet, so all these trophies there, about 11 medals, world championship belts, and so on. And this is my trophy cabinet.

[LAUGHTER]

And every time I say-- his name is [INAUDIBLE]-- every time I tell him, [INAUDIBLE], you've got to do something, he says, Dad, look at my trophy cabinet and look at yours. [LAUGHTER] When you get to half of that, that's when you tell me to do something. [LAUGHTER] So as much as I was thinking I've got a cool profile, when I got home, I'm a nobody. [LAUGHTER]

All right, Aaron's introduction, I'll let Aaron introduce himself.

AARON COATS: Yep, I'm Aaron. I'm from Bates Smart in Sydney, Australia. My role involves software deployment and basically looking after the [INAUDIBLE] staff. We use a myriad of design technology applications, Revit, [INAUDIBLE], Navisworks, [INAUDIBLE], AutoCAD, CAD Points. And I also [INAUDIBLE] A360 courses as well to look after. So I'm looking forward to looking after that.

I do-- one of my favorite hobbies is riding bikes. And it allows me to leave the office really quickly and join my family out of the office.

DEEPAK MAINI: And this is his bike. We actually were planning this year, we'll come to Vegas. We'll hire bikes, and we'll go on a ride. But then it didn't materialize.

All right, Mark's introduction, I guess.

MARK ABRAHAMS: Hi, my name is Mark Abrahams.

DEEPAK MAINI: Welcome, guys, by the way. Welcome to this session.

AARON COATS: Thank you.

DEEPAK MAINI: Sorry, Mark.

MARK ABRAHAMS: Yeah, right. So I'm a BIM manager at DWP. DWP stands for Design Worldwide Partnership. We have offices over eight countries, 12 different studio locations in Australia, Asia, and Middle East. And we are primarily architects and interior designers.

[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]

MARK ABRAHAMS: Just reading what's on the screen there. Apparently I'm a certified Revit professional. That was quite a few years ago. I speak at a number of these conferences around the world. Based out of Newcastle, which is a few hours north of Sydney in Australia. Our office is right by the beach. I get to go-- we have a surfboard rack in the office. So I go surfing at lunchtime. We got an ocean bar right there. So it's a pretty good spot to live, pretty easy. And I also love snowboarding, which I've got to travel a bit further for. But that's pretty much me , I think.

Oh, I've been doing this for a bit over 20 years. In all my jobs I've generally been a sort of CAD manager, BIM manager role. Ever since first office I worked for, my computer was the first office other than the receptionist office. And I started from there. So it's just progressed for over 20 years now.

DEEPAK MAINI: And by they way, Mark loves dancing. This is Mark at one of the conferences in Adelaide earlier this year.

[LAUGHTER]

So tonight at party, when you see us, that's how we will be. Cool guys, and with the sunnies on as well. So, guys, by the way, the guys who came late, we were just telling that we're going to give away a lot of prizes in this class. And one the ones are these cool sunnies. I'm going to wear them again. See, cool sunnies.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, yeah (WHISTLES)

DEEPAK MAINI: But the only thing is, whoever wins the sunnies will have to come here and do a catwalk. That's the only criteria. So make sure you guys are ready for that. All right.

Thanks to-- again, thanks to our sponsors. That's what we are going to do. We are going to give away all of these prizes because of these sponsors here. [INAUDIBLE] the mic.

OK, now before we start with C4R, I though we were going to talk about kangaroos in Australia. And where did this come from? Last time after AU, after the Thursday night party, we went to one of the other parties. And I met this lady there. And she said, oh, I would love to come to Australia. And I want to ride kangaroos there.

[LAUGHTER]

That's a no-- that's one thing you do not do. So I thought in this year at AU, I'm going to first talk about kangaroos in Australia. So first of all, we do not have kangaroos roaming our cities, especially not the main cities, maybe outback and country towns, yes, but not the main cities. We definitely do not have kangaroos as pets. And most importantly, we do not ride kangaroos.

[LAUGHTER]

I think this is going to get me in trouble. All right, so we definitely do not ride kangaroos. Now in some cases, in outback towns and country towns, you might see a situation like this, where kangaroos might be roaming the streets and fighting. The way kangaroos are, their tail is pretty strong. They use their tails as a bar stool. They sit on that, and they fight with forelimbs. So that's why you've got to stay away from kangaroos.

This I can tell you definitely does not happen.

[LAUGHTER]

Right, Mark? This definitely doesn't happen.

MARK ABRAHAMS: [INAUDIBLE]

DEEPAK MAINI: And this, again, doesn't happen.

MARK ABRAHAMS: Actually, it does happen.

[LAUGHTER]

DEEPAK MAINI: Wasn't Glenn, was it?

MARK ABRAHAMS: [INAUDIBLE]

DEEPAK MAINI: All right. There are situations where something like this happens, where this guy goes to outback and his dogs got caught by the kangaroo, and he punches a kangaroo.

[LAUGHTER]

But see how scared he is? Although he punched the kangaroo, he's so scared he's asking his dogs to run away. So this may happen once in about a million years. But normally, this doesn't happen. Normally this is what happens.

[LAUGHTER]

So no getting close to kangaroos, especially in the bush and outback towns, maybe in the zoo, yeah, but definitely not in the bush or outback. All right? OK, let's get into Collaboration for Revit. And I'm going to actually walk around, so I'll probably have to look back as well. OK, so if we--

[SNEEZE]

Bless you. If we look at the AEC industry, there are three main problems that we see that's hindering the industry. The first one is information sharing. And information sharing is because, as all of us know, BIM is not just Revit. BIM basically involves your offering files, which are like your Revit files or your ArchiCAD files, or your Navisworks files, but it also includes your Excel spreadsheets, your R files, your PDF files, and so on. So there's a lot of data that basically makes up BIM.

Revit model worksharing-- so we've got a team sitting in Sydney. We've got the team sitting in Manila. We've got a team sitting in London. How do they work on the same model? That worksharing has been a big, big problem in the industry. Autodesk did come up with the Revit server to solve some problem, which basically, if you get it right, hopefully, it fixes the problem within your firewall in one office. But if you've got all these multiple offices, again, it just doesn't work, especially when you're working in a multi-disciplinary project, where you've got your architecture, structure, services, all these different disciplines and more.

And then change communication-- somebody is working on a model, they make a change, and it's, as I said, a multi-disciplinary project, so the architect moves a wall. Who informs the services guys or the structural engineer or somebody else that something has been changed? That change communication has been a massive problem. So what is the solution?

My director tells me I looked like her when I'm grumpy, which actually is most of the times when I don't get my vodka. All right, so the solution is Collaboration for Revit. Now it's a big statement to make. We are giving you a solution, Collaboration for Revit. But how is that a solution? What difference does it make?

Anybody has used Collaboration for Revit here? I know some of you guys have. All right, fantastic. So you guys can come here and do the talking. I can sit down. Yay! No.

All right, so what's Collaboration for Revit? So first of all, Collaboration for Revit is a BIM 360-based cloud subscription service that works with Revit software to connect the project teams from different locations, so that all of you could work in one single project. It is basically comprised of three main components-- BIM 3-- whoever is taking photographs, I'm going to charge you extra for that. So it comprises of three main components, BIM 360 Team, C4R-- so I'm going to use this acronym C4R, which is Collaboration for Revit, pretty cool acronym like glasses, sunnies-- so C4R Accelerator and C4R Communicator.

So let's try to understand how are these components of Collaboration for Revit resolving the problem? So let's first look at the information sharing issue and how BIM 360 Team helps resolve that problem. So with your Collaboration for Revit license, you get access to a BIM 360 Team. As I mentioned, BIM is not just Revit. BIM comprises of all these different files. And there could be a number of other files as well.

So all these files actually need to be stored somewhere at one single repository. And that is what BIM 360 Team does. It becomes your project directory, where you can not only store your Revit data, but pretty much any format file that you want. And last time when I checked, BIM 360 Team had viewers for 70-- seven zero-- 70 different native format files. So you could pretty much click on a Navisworks file, and it shows you the preview of that. You click on a Word document, it shows you what's in that. You click on an Excel spreadsheet, it shows you what's in that, PDF files, and so on. So 70 different native format files can be viewed on BIM 360 Team just by clicking on it, no viewers required, no nothing required, just out of your browser, nothing fancy.

So as I said, it can be your one single project repository, where every information about your project could be sitting there, and you could be accessing that. And the way it works-- and this is what we are going to show you in this class-- we just add our project members, irrespective of which location they are in. We add our project members to our project, and they get access to all these different files and folders sitting inside our project directory.

So as I said, you can not only use that single repository to share files between different members of your project. You can also preview the files, and you can do deep search. This deep search is an absolutely fantastic tool. What this does is you can click on the Revit model, it opens the Revit model. And you say I want to filter all the I-beams, or I want to filter all the curtain walls. So it hides everything or fades everything else and only shows you the curtain walls or a particular type of walls. So that deep search functionality is pretty fancy, pretty cool in this.

So that was the information sharing problem. The next one is, how is C4R resolving the model worksharing issue? So as I said, when you install Collaboration for Revit on your machine, it installs a tool called C4R Accelerator, Collaboration for Revit Accelerator. The job of the accelerator is to sit in the background, look at your model, compare it with the cloud model, and see if there are some changes made, although you still haven't synced to central.

And then sitting in the background, it looks at these changes and tries to download or upload the changes without you even worrying about that. Now the main thing is, why did Revit Server have all these problems? Because if there are 50 people in the project trying to sync, Revit is a single user access database. So if I am first one in the queue, all of you will have to wait for my sync to finish. And if my sync is taking 20 minutes, the next one-- his sync takes 10 minutes, and so on. Imagine the 50th guy or the good guy in the queue. By that time he's already made tens of different changes.

And because of all that delay, we had all those problems with the file crashings and the file getting corrupt and so on. How many of you have had those problems with the files getting corrupt when you were trying to sync to central? See? Most of us have.

So what this does is it sits in the background, just like a kangaroo-- cool-- and then looks at the changes and delta uploads and downloads the changes. So when you do your final sync to central, there are some tiny amount of data that needs to be synced. And we have worked with the projects where six megs of symmetry connection, just six meg of symmetry connection, does a brilliant job.

We had a customer between Melbourne and Darwin, which is pretty much nowhere in the world. They were working on this massive hospital project in Darwin. And they were syncing to central with the Darwin project. And in the normal case, it was taking them about 45, 50 minutes to open the file. And they said, one out of three times the file would crash. And with C4R, it took them 40 seconds-- four zero-- 40 seconds.

So that's where this Collaboration for Revit Accelerator does, it in the background. It delta transfers the changes. So when you actually sync to central, it's a lot quicker. So that's the job of C4R Accelerator.

And then finally, we've got Communicator. All of us are from this technology era where we love quick access to the information, whether it's through text messages, chat, WhatsApp, Facebook chats, whatever it is. So what C4R Communicator does is it's like a chat window that-- you are leaving us, [INAUDIBLE]. How could you do that to us?

[LAUGHTER]

MARK ABRAHAMS: No one else dares leave now.

DEEPAK MAINI: Yeah no one is allowed to leave now. All right, so what this C4R Communicator does is it gives you the capability to do chats with the entire project team or a particular person in the project team. But the best part is, all this chat can actually be exported later on in the project. So for example, six months down the line, you want to find out maybe what was communicated and so on. You can export the chat. It exports it as a text file. You can use various automated tools to put it in a Word document or Excel or whatever you want. All that can be done.

So it lets you do team chat. It lets you do one-on-one chat. But most importantly, it gives you clear information about the project-- who's online; who's actually not even working, they have gone to the pub down the road; or who's taken the day off, going to the beach like Mark. Mark lives about what? 10 meters from the beach. So who is gone to the beach to have fun?

It gives you all that information there. And the best part is, it also gives you a contextual awareness of the project as to who's syncing the project, who's in what model doing what. So later on when we are doing live demonstration, we are going to show you how you'll be able to see that Aaron's in the architecture model, I'm in the structure model, and so on. It gives you contextual awareness of the entire project, giving you all the information as to what's happening.

So basically, what I wanted to mention is the three main problems that we see in the AEC industry, how are we able to resolve those using Collaboration for Revit? And I just mentioned that we can use these smart tools to resolve those issues. We are going to show you a live demonstration of all these things as well. And it's going to be funny.

So, have you ever been to a presentation where you got three speakers plugging in, plugging out, switching between those? It's going to be funny. And I requested them to have one of the lecterns sitting on the other side, so that way we are not crammed in one single room. Although we can feel the love, but we still want you to be on the other side of the room. But having said that, it's going to be interesting when we do the live demonstration.

All right, now before we get into all that, I just wanted to talk about some project-based permission levels. So what happens is-- and by the way, did you guys download the handouts that I uploaded? I took a lot of time in creating that handouts. And that actually is a Bible that can take you all the way from scratch of C4R to the project delivery, starting from step number one. So make sure if you like the handout, give me five out of five for handout.

So project-level permissions-- project admin is the person who creates the project on BIM 360 Team, which actually is step number two. Step number one is assigning the hub, which I've discussed in the handouts. So project admin is the person who creates the project on BIM 360 Team and invites all the team members.

Now when I'm inviting the team members, I can invite them as editors or viewers. Editors are the people who actually would be working with Revit and syncing to the cloud central. These guys need C4R licenses. But then you have got viewers like construction manager or product architect, who actually is not going to work with Revit, but he needs access to the Revit model for the coordination meetings and mockups and so on. That's a viewer license. Viewers do not require a C4R license. They are free. So you can get as many views as free to the project.

I'll make this slide available as a PDF file after the presentation as well. So that way, if you guys want to refer to something back, you can always do that because I'm going to provide that to you. The only thing is, I'm going to charge you extra for that. That's the only thing.

All right, now before we get into that really, really, really-- and I can keep saying really, really, really, but really, really, really important thing about the C4R. Are there are two separate servers. This is where people get confused. There are two separate servers. There's a C4R server, and there's a BIM 360 Team Server.

C4R server is where you upload the files for C4R workflow. This is where you upload your initial files. This is where your live Revit files are sitting. You are syncing to central here on C4R Server.

This is where you'll link the files as well. You open the files from this location or this server, you link the files from this. But you know how you're working on an architectural model or a structural model, every 10 minutes, 20 minutes you're making changes, and every one hour you're syncing to central or whatever it is? Imagine the number of versions it's creating every time you sync to central. Do we need all those versions for our coordination meetings? No. So what we do is BIM 360 Team Server is where our files for viewing and mockup is sitting that people without the Revit license-- or sorry, without the C4R license-- or with the C4R license can access.

So these people do not need to see every single version where we have just moved the wall here. We have saved and synced to central, and it creates a new version. These people do not need to see those files, right? They only need to see the files when we are ready to publish for our coordination meeting. So that's where our coordination meeting or your viewing files are sitting.

But the best part is, version one of the files are automatically uploaded on the BIM 360 Team Server when you upload them to the C4R server. So for our C4R workflow, as soon as we upload the files to the C4R server, they are also automatically copied to the BIM 360 Team Server.

But from there on, every single change version needs to be manually pushed. In a normal C4R project, we are going to push the file up for a viewing on BIM 360 Team every Thursday. So Thursday afternoon, we are going to run the coordination meeting. And we're going to use that location for that. We don't have to publish the file for viewing every day unless it is important for your project. Maybe it's something critical that you want to talk about. Then you can publish it whenever you want. But normally we say once in a week, maybe Thursday because that's when we run our coordination meeting.

So the project that we are going to use for this presentation is a project called Boomerang Tower Case Study in Sydney by Bates Smart. So, Aaron, as he mentioned in his introduction, he's the national BIM manager of Bates Smart.

So this is in the Sydney Olympic Park precinct. It's called Homebush, which is the suburb. And this is actually the project. A little image of the project-- I also have a little video that I'll play that gives you an idea of this project.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DEEPAK MAINI: So that's the opera house and the harbor bridge.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[END PLAYBACK]

DEEPAK MAINI: So, Aaron, let me ask you this question. As a BIM manager on this project, do you get about four or five apartments in this building complementary?

AARON COATS: No.

DEEPAK MAINI: And can I get one of those, please?

AARON COATS: OK.

DEEPAK MAINI: All right, I'm going to hand it over to Aaron now. And he's going to talk about a few things about this project and normally as a company.

AARON COATS: Thanks, Deepak. So as part of the presentation, we like to show an actual project using C4R and kind of go through the process that we went through. As you can see from the video, we're very fussy about the way the building looks-- wrong way.

I'm from Bates Smart. We're a design lead practice. We like to work mostly at the front end of the projects. We're one of the oldest architectural practices in Australia. We've been around since, I think, 1853.

And then mostly-- and we've survived, I guess, the dips in terms of the economy and try to keep a really good culture in the office as well. So one of the ways to do that, unfortunately, is to outsource projects. And we do that at outsource documentation for projects at the back end.

So we're very fussy about the way it looks. We want a lot of control. And once we started outsourcing documentation, like a few projects, we found it was quite actually challenging. The issues that we found without C4R is around, I guess, the control of the model. We used firms in New Zealand and Vietnam.

When we hand over the projects, we give them maybe CAD files or Revit files or Rhino file. They then translate it. We will get the models back. They will put them on ShareFile or some sort of platform like that.

And then what would happen is you would then, if you needed a change, you would need to speak to them, email, that sort of thing, and hopefully get a response back in a fast timeframe. Previously we would have, obviously on the left, we have our Revit models over in Vietnam. We have tons and tons of emails, Skype, phone calls, and our design team sitting over in Sydney or Melbourne.

We knew we needed to find a better way to do this. Luckily, about two years ago, they started the AWS Server, which does BIM 360 in Singapore. So it was feasible to do this. Mostly a lot of information traveling, and it's actually quite possible to do this, even using-- even in between Washington, where we're doing the Australian Embassy, and Melbourne and in other cities as well in Southeast Asia. So simple tasks such as getting a set of PDFs were not difficult, but it was just time-consuming. And you have staff who know how to use Revit but couldn't actually see the file. So we'd always get a mirrored copy of the file.

OK, so the case study project is Boomerang Tower. We're using a design and construct contract. Basically we have a client, we won it by competition, and you get novated to the builder or the contractor. He becomes your boss. And basically he wants feedback as quick as possible. And we're using C4R for the architecture.

So the three models we use is an architecture file, interiors file, and a facade file. And we use also structural disciplines for all their Revit models as well. And we have the design team located in Sydney and Vietnam.

So the workflow that we used-- the primary modeling was done in Rhino. That controlled the facade. What we needed to do was have 100% of the apartments have solar access to the northern side. We then optimized that using Ladybug. We then pushed all the coordinates into Excel, read it back into Dynamo, and then fed it into Revit, and then had that connection via C4R with our team in Vietnam.

The most important thing to remember is we didn't actually create the geometry in Rhino. We didn't push any geometry from Rhino into Revit. We actually only pushed the points, where we had families that would actually recreate the model as well. And that's what our team in Vietnam was doing.

OK, so how did we solve the problem? So our design team had live access to the models at every stage of the project. There was greater collaboration. We had a better connection with our documentation partners. And it allowed us to monitor the models as well. We could see when the team members in Vietnam opened the model. We could see how long they're in the model. We can see when they synced. And we can see where they're syncing as well. And we'll go through that as well as part of the presentation.

And then we also got to make minor changes in the model quite quickly. We could actually do markups on the screen, which they would see. So we would use a particular text style that was bright blue. And then the other team could see it as well. And we would obviously always communicate this via Communicator also.

OK, so I guess just wrapping up, we still have to use things like Skype and email, but they have been drastically reduced using C4R.

DEEPAK MAINI: All right, so what we did for this class was I requested a cable connection, which unfortunately we can't get in the hotel apparently. So what we did was I recorded some videos for some basic stuff. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the videos, and I'm going to talk over those videos to show you some basic functionalities. And then we are going to do the live demonstration.

So getting started with the Collaboration for Revit-- the first step is to basically assign a hub to your project. Again, I have discussed that in detail in the handout that I've written. So once you download the handout, you'll be able to do that from scratch.

I'm going to start from step number two, which is creating a project from scratch. So I'm playing a video here, where all we do is we go to BIM 360 Team and we sign in. And then from the top right, we have an option called Create Project. So these are all the projects that I can view. And I'm in the Team CAD Group hub.

I'm a part of a number of different hubs as well. You could see there. So to create a project, you just specify the name. You pick an image, or you can create your own image and use it. So you just click on Create Project, and it creates a new project from scratch.

Once that new project from scratch is created, you can then invite members to that project by simply clicking on Invite. You type in their email addresses, and you can define the role. In this case, Aaron's role is an editor. So as soon as I hit Send Invitation, Aaron straightaway gets an email that he has been invited to a Collaboration for Revit project.

Once you accept that, you can see him here. Now there are three types of projects. We can create Open, Closed, and Secret. Closed projects are the ones that other team members can see but cannot participate in unless I invite them. But the secret project is that only the people I invite to, although they may be part of the hub, others cannot see. Only the people I invite to, only those people can see secret projects.

So you know how initially I could see all those projects. If any of those projects were secret projects, and if I was not a part of the project, although I'm part of the hub, I will still not be able to see that project. All right?

So normally, the projects that we create are closed projects because that way we invite people to those projects. And if somebody we have forgotten, they can actually click on that project, and they can say, I want to be invited to that. So that way I can decide whether I want to invite them or not. Whether they had bought me a beer or not, that decides that.

All right, the next one is initial uploading of model for the C4R workflow. So at this stage, all our Revit models are sitting locally on our machines, or on network drives, or wherever they are. How do we get those models ready for collaboration for Revit workflow?

What we do is we go and open the model. So in this case, I'll just simply go and say Open. As you can see, I'm going to my local drive, which is coming on from my D drive. I go to the Start Assets folder, and I pick the file that I need to upload.

I'm opening this file here. Once this file is opened, that's when I'm going to go into this Collaborate tab and click on Collaborate, provided you are already signed in. If you are not, it will ask you to sign in. And then I'm going to go and say Collaborate Using Cloud, not Collaborate Using Revit Server. It says, all right, what project do you want to put this file in? So just specify the project and say Initiate.

It starts the process of getting the model ready for workshare. If the model is not already workshare ready, it'll get the model ready for worksharing. And then it will then upload the model. What it also does is it creates a local cache of the model, which means next time when you're opening the model, it only needs to open the changes. The rest it opens from the local cache.

But the best part is, unlike Revit Server, where every time you open and you say Create Local or whatever it is, we don't have to do that. It happens automatically in C4R. That's the best part.

So what I did was I fast forwarded these videos, and you will see some funny things going on. So on the lower left corner, you can see the progress of your model as well, when it's uploading it, when it's getting it ready for C4R workflow. So it's now saving the local cache of the model as well.

So this model has been uploaded for C4R workflow. I thought I'll probably upload a few more models as well. But again, I think that's waste of everybody's time. You guys get the idea. We open the model locally from our machine. We say Collaborate, Collaborate Using Cloud. That's how we upload all the models.

So how does BIM 360 Team looks like after our first C4R upload? You remember I mentioned there are two separate servers? There's a C4R server and BIM 360 Team server. And if you remember, I mentioned after your initial upload to C4R, it automatically uploads the files for BIM 360 Team viewing as well. So this is how it looks like. If I go to my C4R project here, it says that these are the four files that you uploaded.

What you can also do is you can create folders here and copy the files and folders. All these are version 1 files right now. And it tells me when these files were uploaded.

I can go and say I want to create a new folder. So let's say you've got 10 different file formats, 10 different disciplines and so on. You can create a folder. In my case I just created a folder called Facades and Interior. And I'm going to move those files in there. So I've got Structure and Architecture sitting outside the folder. The rest of the files are sitting inside the folder.

But this does not affect your workflow. Moving files and folders has no bearing on how you are syncing to central on C4R and so on. It still knows where those files are. So it's got absolutely no bearing on that kind of stuff.

So if I go to this folder here now, I can see these two files. You don't have to do it, but if you've got a number of different disciplines, it is better to organize them in folders. As I said, it has got absolutely zero bearing on when you're syncing the files from Revit to this Revit central-- or the cloud central. It has no bearing on how the files are save here.

All right, now let's talk about non-Revit users. So project engineers, construction managers, and so on, who actually need access to the files for markups and reviews and so on, but they're not going to use Revit. So how do we add those people? Again, the process is exactly the same that I showed you.

We click on Invite. We specify the name of the person we need to invite or the email addresses. And then we go and change their role from Editor to Viewer, simple as that. As I mentioned, in case of viewers, you do not need license of C4R. Viewers are added for free. The only thing is, they can only participate in this project. You don't even need BIM 360 Team license. So you are added to that project, and you can access that project only.

So you can see all the people that are added to the project here. There's also this option called View and Manage Members. So if your project was a closed project and somebody from your team went in there and said, I want to be invited to the project, you can click on this and you can see if there are any pending invites that you want to accept. All that can be done using View and Manage Projects.

All right, linking files from C4R Server. So we have got all these files that all the have uploaded. Now the whole idea is to link these files so we could work in a collaborative environment. How does that work? We simply go and open the file from C4R this time, not from our local machine. So when we go and say Open, we open from C4R.

If the file has already been opened, you would see this icon here. This icon tells you that it's a C4R or a BIM 360 file. If you don't see the icon, that means it is coming from your local machine. So it's a pretty good visual clue on your home page telling you which file is a C4R file and which file is not a C4R five.

Alternatively, you can click on BIM 360 here, and you can go to the project from where you want to open the file, and you can just click on the file that you want to open. So now it's opening the file from C4R Server. And because it also had a local cache copy on this machine, it takes lot lesser time. The first download might take a bit longer, but otherwise, if it's already got a local cache, it opens it really, really quickly.

You can see it [INAUDIBLE] in the background when I was recording the videos as well. I didn't do a good job on that, did I?

All right, you can also see all the members of the project here. And we are going to talk about this in detail in a sec. But this file has been opened from C4R. And we can, as I said, see the members here. And this is the Communicator. We are going to talk about Communicator in detail.

You can look at the contacts that you've been talking to frequently. You can go to the chat window, where you can chat with a team member or individual members. And this is the area where it gives you the contextual awareness of your project, who's syncing, who's synced when, and any comments that they added. Everything is visible right in front of you. How cool is that?

This is what we were talking about, the model changes, how we get the information about who's changing the model, what people are doing. In the past, we did not have this visibility. Whereas now, we have that visibility right in front of us.

To link the files, we go to the link folder. But what we do is we go and say link from the external resource, which is BIM 360. So that's where we are going to link the file from. And we select the file that we want to link. And I have sped up this process. Hopefully it will take just a few seconds. And once that is done, you go and say, OK.

You can also go in and add other disciplines using the exact same process. But the main thing is we are linking from our cloud central, nobody's local drive. Right? Because all these files are sitting on the cloud central, when these disciplines are working and syncing to their central, we'll be able to reload these files with all the changes as well. That's the whole concept of Collaboration for Revit. That's how we are working in a collaborative environment.

All right, as it's doing this, you can see all the Revit links here. All right, I'm going to click the Save button. So because I have made changes to this architecture file, I'll hit the Save button. Once it's saved the file, I'm going to go and say sync to the cloud central. When I click on this, this is the important dialog box. I strongly recommend you specify the comments here.

Why are comments important? Let's say two weeks into the project we are on to version 13 of the file, and we realize that the changes that we made in last two weeks, the clients says, no, I don't want those changes. Roll back the model. So we can go to the previous version of the model. We can look at the datewise or we can look at the comments and roll back the previous version of the model as our current version. How cool is that? It's absolutely amazing technology.

All right, now is the time where I'm going to ask a question for cool Bluebeam sunnies. All right, you remember the thing about the sunnies, whoever wins the sunnies will have to come here and do a catwalk? Nah, I was just kidding. All right, so if I go to BIM 360 Team, what version of my architectural file will I see there? You've got to help me out. You go to-- yeah, sorry, sorry, that gentleman.

AUDIENCE: First version.

DEEPAK MAINI: First version? Why first version?

AUDIENCE: The initial upload [INAUDIBLE] to be is [INAUDIBLE]

DEEPAK MAINI: Exactly. So the answer was-- you guys can't hear it? I'll tell you. So he's spot on. I will still see version one of the file. Why? Because I've synced to the cloud central, but I have not published the file for viewing. Remember I mentioned version one of the file is automatically uploaded with the initial upload? But any other subsequent version needs to be manually published. So here you go, sir, cool sunnies. Ah, look at you, all these tags.

All right, so let's get the files ready for publishing to BIM 360 Team. The process for that is-- see, as you can see, we are still on version one of the architecture file. If I go to my Revit model now, and you can see it was uploaded 20 hours ago, which was like about a month back. To get the model ready, the first thing we do is-- this is the tool that we use, which is called Manage Cloud Models.

We go to the project. It gives us all the models in that project. And that's where we upload the files from. But one thing that we, or anybody who uses C4R, strongly recommends-- am I blocking the view? All right. One thing that we strongly recommend is before you upload these files, we should get the views and select only the important views that you want to take. Because this file had close to about 80 different views. If you publish the file with 80 views, it's going to take ages for that viewing model to be ready in BIM 360 Team.

So what we do is go to this tool called Publish Settings. See how we would all the-- and these are just the sheets. And if I go and clear the filter, it's going to show me about 80 different views. We don't want to take all those views. So I'm going to filter it to 3D views. Anyone, just in case of 3D views, there are quite a few.